as she ducked beneath the hoist, clearly more interested in the car than in anything she had to say and Annie walked quickly across the yard, through a gate and up a well-lit path to the rear of a long, low stone-built house and let herself in through the back door.
The mud room was little more than a repository for boots and working clothes, a place to wash off the workplace dirt, but as she walked into the kitchen she was wrapped in the heat being belted out by an ancient solid fuel stove.
Now this was familiar, she thought, relaxing as she crossed to the sink, filled the kettle and set it on the hob to boil.
This room, so much more than a kitchen, was typical of the farmhouses at King’s Lacey, her grandfather’s Warwickshire estate.
Her last memory of her father was being taken to visit the tenants before he’d gone away for the last time. She’d been given brightly coloured fizzy pop and mince pies while he’d talked to people he’d known since his boyhood, asking about their children and grandchildren, discussing the price of feedstuff, grain. She’d played with kittens, fed the chickens, been given fresh eggs to take home for her tea. Been a child.
She ran her hand over the large, scrubbed-top table, looked at the wide dresser, laden with crockery and piled up with paperwork. Blinked back the tear that caught her by surprise before turning to a couple of Morris armchairs, the leather seats scuffed and worn, the wooden arms rubbed with wear, one of them occupied by a large ginger cat.
A rack filled with copies of motoring magazines stood beside one, a bag stuffed with knitting beside the other. There was a dog basket by the Aga, but no sign of its owner.
She let the cat sniff her fingers before rubbing it behind the ear, starting up a deep purr. Comfortable, it was the complete opposite of the state-of-the-art kitchen in her London home. Caught in a nineteen-fifties time warp, the only concession to modernity here was a large refrigerator, its cream enamel surface chipped with age, and a small television set tucked away on a shelf unit built beside the chimney breast.
The old butler’s sink, filled with dishes that were no doubt waiting for Xandra’s attention—George Saxon didn’t look the kind of man who was familiar with a dish mop—suggested that the age of the dishwasher had not yet reached the Saxon household.
She didn’t have a lot of time to spare for basic household chores these days, but there had been a time, long ago, when she had been allowed to stand on a chair and wash dishes, help cook when she was making cakes and, even now, once in a while, when they were in the country, she escaped to the comfort of her childhood kitchen, although only at night, when the staff were gone.
She wasn’t a child any more and her presence was an intrusion on their space.
Here, though, she was no one and she peeled off the woolly hat and fluffed up her short hair, enjoying the lightness of it. Then she hung her padded jacket on one of the pegs in the mud room before hunting out a pair of rubber gloves and pitching in.
Washing up was as ordinary as it got and she was grinning by the time she’d cleared the decks. It wasn’t what she’d imagined she’d be doing this evening, but it certainly fulfilled the parameters of the adventure.
By the time she heard the back door open, the dishes were draining on the rack above the sink and she’d made a large pot of tea for herself and Xandra, and a cup of instant coffee for George.
‘Oh…’ Xandra came to an abrupt halt at the kitchen door as she saw the table on which she was laying out cups and saucers. ‘I usually just bung a teabag in a mug,’ she said. Then, glancing guiltily at the sink, her eyes widened further. ‘You’ve done the washing-up…’
‘Well, you did tell me to make myself at home,’ Annie said, deadpan.
It took Xandra a moment but then she grinned. ‘You’re a brick. I was going to do it before Gran got home.’
A brick? No one had ever called her that before.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ she replied, pouring tea while Xandra washed her hands at the sink. ‘Your gran is at the hospital with your grandfather, I imagine?’
Before Xandra could answer, George Saxon followed her into the kitchen, bringing with him a metallic blast of cold air.
He came to an abrupt halt, staring at her for a moment. Or, rather, she thought, her hair, and she belatedly wished she’d kept her hat on, but it was too late for that.
‘Has she told you?’ he demanded, finally tearing his gaze away from what she knew must look an absolute fright.
‘Told me what?’ she asked him.
‘That you’ve broken your crankshaft.’
‘No,’ she said, swiftly tiring of the novelty of his rudeness. A gentleman would have ignored the fact that she was having a seriously bad hair day rather than staring at the disaster in undisguised horror. ‘I gave my ankle a bit of a jolt in that pothole but, unless things have changed since I studied anatomy, I don’t believe that I have a crankshaft.’
Xandra snorted tea down her nose as she laughed, earning herself a quelling look from her father.
‘You’ve broken the crankshaft that drives the wheels of your car,’ he said heavily, quashing any thought she might have of joining in. ‘It’ll have to be replaced.’
‘If I knew what a crankshaft was,’ she replied, ‘I suspect that I’d be worried. How long will it take?’
He shrugged. ‘I’ll have to ring around in the morning and see if there’s anyone who can deal with it as an emergency.’
Annie heard what he said but even when she ran through it again it still made no sense.
‘Why?’ she asked finally.
He had the nerve to turn a pair of slate-grey eyes on her and regard her as if her wits had gone begging.
‘I assume you want it repaired?’
‘Of course I want it repaired. That’s why I called you. You’re a garage. You fix cars. So fix it.’
‘I’m sorry but that’s impossible.’
‘You don’t sound sorry.’
‘He isn’t. While Granddad’s lying helpless in hospital he’s going to shut down a garage that’s been in the family for nearly a hundred years.’
‘Are you?’ she asked, keeping her gaze fixed firmly on him. ‘That doesn’t sound very sporting.’
He looked right back and she could see a pale fan of lines around his eyes that in anyone else she’d have thought were laughter lines.
‘He flew all the way from California for that very purpose,’ his daughter said when he didn’t bother to answer.
‘California?’ Well, that certainly explained the lines around his eyes. Screwing them up against the sun rather than an excess of good humour. ‘How interesting. What do you do in California, Mr Saxon?’
Her life consisted of asking polite questions, drawing people out of their shell, showing an interest. She had responded with her ‘Lady
